jenny lind and media pressure

I've been thinking about photoshop and surgery and models and pressure on today's girls and women.

We love to say that, the way things are going, ladies are now surrounded by images of a distorted "perfection," that encourage them to feel bad about themselves and take all sorts of measures, ranging from the absurd to the dangerous, to try to match the unreality they see in magazines and social media.

After all, as you see above, when faced with one of the most beautiful women in the world, the fashion company said, "Great! Let's fix her!"    Aside from the missing wrinkles, there's the missing back fat.    It's not particularly weird-looking in the ad (as the wrinkle-free face is), and it's not at all terrible in the snapshot.    Demi Moore's back fat is enviable, in fact.    But it got axed.    Of course, Britney Spears got a full-body makeover, as she shows by posting her real pic on the right, next to the ad on the left.   

Again, an incredibly fit entertainer was thinned-down for the ad.    What does this do to women?   

In my experience, this affects the body-images of women who are already fit —– they're ninety percent there, and the remaining ten percent turns into some kind of distorting obsession.    As for the rest of the population, have you ever been to Galveston beach?    They wear the skimpy things they see on the models, and imagine themselves to be those models;  they are emphatically not.    But they don't care:  the magic of the culture has done its work, and they get a little piece of glamour.    That, to me, is the healthier view.

I was at the beach once with Catherine, who has the body of a goddess, and is therefore vulnerable to the usual insecurities;  she saw a woman who was wearing a somewhat revealing swimsuit that showed her ripples and tiger stripes (those belly stretch-marks, now named with an empoweringly sexy term).    She was struck by the woman's beauty and confidence.    It gave her an added confidence too.

Meanwhile, the aspirational thing is, I think, a key.    There's scholarship that shows that the more "realistic" bodies people keep saying they want to see aren't actually what they want to see, at least when it comes to buying the product advertised.    The ladies on Galveston beach are right.

The other thing to point out is that this stuff is nothing new.    We say that the gals in Marilyn Monroe's time were full-figured, and the culture didn't demand slenderness from them.    But that idea is a misty wish.    The full-figured gal herself, in those infamous red satin photos, was heavily airbrushed to fit beauty standards that look remarkably familiar to the modern eye.    Improbably long legs, slender waist, the whole bit.

We also have some side-by-sides, courtesy of the fashion and pinup artist Earl Moran, for whom Monroe modeled.    Guess what?

Her figure already adheres to even the most modern standards (in ordinary terms), but even then, and even 70 years ago or more, the artist slims her legs insanely, dainties her feet to the impossible, gives her an extreme nose job and gets rid of the nasolabial fold (the Paul Lynde sneer valley), and slims her already-slim waist even further.    These standards of beauty may be unrealistic, but they're certainly not new.

Take a look at the above.    Again, the real 1940s (yep, 40s) Monroe fits 21st-century (unrealistic) beauty standards amazingly well, but still comes under the virtual knife.    The artist lengthens her right femur, tones up her upper arms, which look like a very fit modern woman's but maybe not quite like a modern model's, tones her belly, takes a good 5 inches off her already tiny waist (making her positively skinny, nearly as much as any scorned modern ad), perts her breasts, shapes and dainties her foot just a bit, though showing admirable restraint that he throws to the wind in depicting her fingers, which are lengthened and slimmed beyond any reality.    He also treats the planes of her face and head, which now suddenly look harsh and ungainly in the photo —– this photo of one of the most famously beautiful women in history.

What a transformation!    Check it out:

I recently saw a photo of Jenny Lind, a daguerrotype from the 1850s.    I'd seen portraits of her before, but never a photo.    The Swedish Nightingale, who, by the way, really *could* sing celestially —– P. T. Barnum was a huckster, but he knew she could deliver on his most outrageous promises, and you should look up how outrageous they were sometime —– was considered beautiful enough, especially in all the costume and make-up opera uses to create the same tricks we've been talking about.    Her engraved image was all over everything, from sheet-music to storefronts to childrens' books to toys and candy and special soda bottles.

But now look at the two together.

Nose job, shapely lips, slim cheeks with cheekbones, defined chest, slim waist, long arms, long slender fingers:  it's all there.